How to Eat Soup Without a Bowl

You probably guessed from the last picture that a sad fate befell that white sweater we let him wear to eat spaghetti. This is the new feeding attire. He won't wear bibs, so it's easiest just to take off his shirt and scrub him down when he finishes.

Today is Jonathan's last day before heading back to classes to finish out the semester. We are still in search of a place in Orange County, and I am still in search of a job, but as we get closer to the move date I find that I'm more and more reluctant to keep applying with out-of-town addresses and phone numbers and more and more tempted to wait till I have a local address to show off on my letters & resumes.

What happened in Jonathan's vacation? He finished a draft of his new novel, which is outstanding and I stayed up late to read on Friday night. (I also finished my skirt, and am very happy with it--a well-matched lining will disguise a multitude of small knitting errors.) I then got woken up at 5 am by a little mister who is having weird sleep issues. He's been trying to shift his nap schedule for a while now, but leaving it to his lead has resulted in his still taking two naps and just not sleeping well at night. Now we're shifting morning nap later by 15 minutes every day, so in a little while he should be on a one-nap in the early afternoon schedule and sleeping later in the mornings--at least, that's our plan; we'll see how well he goes along with it.

In any case, yesterday we were all very, very tired. Tristram never did really nap. Fortunately we have plenty of those magical places called parks around here. No matter how tired he is, if you take him to the park he will be happy, and if he gets to spend a couple of hours there he will even stay happy once you get him back home. I am never doing a winter shut indoors in a small apartment with a one-year-old and no pets to help amuse him again. I can't believe how much easier child care is now.

I have been puzzling for some time over why all the ponies at the Poney Club de L'Ile are geldings. No stallions for little kids makes sense, but no mares? There are some people who just don't like mares, though; once in a while you'll find an establishment in the U.S. that insists on geldings only. We discovered yesterday that they do indeed have mares, or at least one mare. It's just that they haven't been using for lessons, they've been using her for breeding! She was out in their little pasture area with her filly (so I guess now they have two females on the premises). The tiny baby of a tiny pony is unbelievably cute. Tiny gallop!

Friday we did indeed make it to the Parc Floral, which is spectacular. We only saw a little bit, since it's big enough that if you went with no kids at all it would take you all day to see the whole place. And when you have a toddler in tow, you can either resign yourself to making him miserable by keeping in the stroller while you go around being goal-oriented, or you can let him out to play and wander and resign yourself to not getting to very many official destinations. (Jonathan points out that the one advantage to all the immobilization and sensory deprivation French babies are subjected to is that they get so passive they WILL just sit quietly in their strollers and let the rest of the family have fun till they're about twice Tristram's age.) As soon as we got there, we found some trees to sit under and let him out so we could eat lunch. We did strap him back in to see the rhododendron garden, which is at its peak right now and is pretty incredible, and I saw some tree peonies blooming, so I was utterly content. We let him out to play again, and were just debating whether to let him play till we needed to leave or try to see one more garden when he blew out his diaper in dramatic style. So as it happened, the one last thing we went to see was a bathroom.

We haven't settled on a plan for today yet. Whatever we pick, I am pretty sure it will involve a park of some sort.